Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Read Online Free PDF Page A

a young artist's model in Paris. Three young English art students are in love with her, and she becomes engaged to one of them, William Bagot (who is nauseatingly called ‘Little Billie’ throughout the book). But their relationship breaks down and she falls into the clutches of Svengali, a Jew ( Jews were often thought in Victorian times to have mesmeric powers), gaunt and grim, with a pointed beard and dark, staring eyes. Svengali, from Hungary, is a musician, and by the use of hypnotism he turns Trilby, who has a resonant speaking voice but is tone deaf, into an outstanding singer.
    The book is not as melodramatic as the many film versions of it would have one believe, except in du Maurier's own illustrations. Nor is mesmerism as pervasive in the story as in the films. Svengali displays his hypnotic power early in the book by alleviating a neuralgic pain from which Trilby is suffering. A little later he tries to hypnotize her again, against her will, as a way of gaining control over her, because he wants to marry her, and is foiled only by the bluff Englishmen, who look after her and are deeply suspicious of Svengali. So when Svengali and Trilby reappear, later in the book, as a married couple, the great diva and her manager, we know he's been up to his tricks. In the middle of a triumphant tour of Europe, Svengali dies in the theatre, Trilby's gift fails her and she makes a laughing stock of herself; she can sing only when entranced and fixed by his eyes. After Svengali's death, her former life as an international star seems totally unreal, only vaguely remembered, if at all. She remembers only his kindness to her, not his bullying and physical violence. ‘There were two Trilbys’, as du Maurier puts it in the book – or, in psychological parlance, her hypnotized self was dissociated from her waking self.
    Du Maurier's novel was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, selling over 200,000 copies in the first year alone. Trilby's songs from the book were sung by socialites at parties, and the bookwas soon turned into a stage play. But the plot is not as original as du Maurier might have pretended to Henry James. It's not just that a number of earlier novels had featured an evil, manipulative mesmerist or hypnotist. James Braid, the Scottish doctor who exploded the myth of magnetism and introduced hypnotism, wrote in 1850 of how he hypnotized a musically incompetent girl and took her through some of the most difficult exercises in the repertoire of Jenny Lind, the soprano, known as the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, who was conquering the world at the time. Moreover, in Alexandre Dumas's
Memoirs of a Physician
, first published in French in 1848, Joseph Balsamo mesmerizes Lorenza Feliciani, after saving her from rape, and marries her while she is under his spell. She, too, manifests two different personalities: in a trance she loves her husband and is grateful to him for rescuing her from the bandits; but when ‘awake’ she hates him and longs to be allowed to go to the convent where she was heading when she was set upon by the bandits.
    But the success of
Trilby
has made Svengali the prototype, and the deepest spell cast by him has been over future fictional treatments of hypnosis, and hence over the minds of generations of audiences. Unwittingly, we have all taken in false beliefs, such as the two perpetuated by du Maurier, that a person can be kept in a permanent hypnotic trance and that we can be made by a hypnotist to do something we would not ordinarily do. The evil Medina in John Buchan's 1924 thriller
The Three Hostages
also keeps his victims in a permanent trance. Total dominance of will through hypnosis features prominently in numerous cheap thrillers, but also in more upmarket treatments. Cipolla, the deformed and boastful conjuror and stage hypnotist of Thomas Mann's
Mario and the Magician
(1930) likes to impose his will on members of the audience even to the extent of